Your New Detroit

PublishedOctober 17, 2016

The New Detroit. Not to be confused with “The Next Detroit“, which was the last Detroit, not the current one.

Lot of development, and rapid changes in the Downtown and Midtown areas. In fact, if you squint real hard and try to see Detroit as only these sections near the Central Business District and the stadia…well you could get a pretty rosey impression of our old friend Detroit.

Here is the new hockey stadium across Woodward Avenue from Brush Park.

This is the new state of the art Cobo Hall convention center.

New L.E.D. street lights on many of the main roads, like this stretch of Gratiot Avenue.

New windows for the still empty and unrepaired Michigan Central Station. It is cleaned out and guarded a little better now though.

The bazillion dollar hyped up Ransom Gillis, which is a front and back flat now. Needs more landscaping, but it is pretty.

Gigantic apartment buildings as part of the Dan Gilbert developments in Brush Park. These stretch from Brush to Woodward.
I call Downtown and Brush Park “Gilbertsville” now, because it is like he is the mayor and owns it all. I know it is collectively owned by more than one person, it’s just that the intense concentration of wealth and control could be considered distasteful to some folks.

The new rail system stretches all the way up to New Center…where it is going to stop I guess ? Not sure why they think that is a good route that people need, but anyway – there is a lot of infrastructure work going along with the light rail tracks. There is also new life in the Argonaut Building which now houses part of the College for Creative Studies campus.

Linking New Center, Midtown and Downtown will probably strengthen all three.

The historic neighborhood of Cortktown is always awesome, so long as you love pork and that giant empty train station.

Book Tower – anybody know what is happening to this poor mess of a building ?

Of course the City of Detroit does not consist of merely Midtown and Downtown. Not by far, and much of the other areas are still in unbelieveably bad condition. So bad as to threaten the sustainability of any of the successful developments around Downtown.

Let’s hope the concentration on Downtown becomes a catalyst, but I have yet to see to much of that in my lifetime.

Still – a lot of really great stuff going on around town, this is undeniable.